The goal of the Storage Tank™ project is to provide a complete
storage management solution in a heterogeneous, distributed
environment. Storage Tank is designed to provide I/O performance
that is comparable to that of file systems built on bus-attached,
high-performance storage. In addition, it provides high
availability, increased scalability and centralized, automated
storage and data management.
Storage Tank uses Storage Area Network (SAN) technology that allows
an enterprise to connect thousands of devices, such as client and
server machines and mass storage subsystems, to a high-performance
network. On a SAN, heterogeneous clients can access large volumes
of data directly from storage devices using high-speed, low-latency
connections. The Storage Tank implementation is currently built on
a Fibre Channel network. However, it could also be built on any
other high-speed network, such as Gigabit Ethernet (iSCSI), for
which network-attached storage devices become available.
Storage Tank differs from conventional distributed file systems
in that it uses a data-access model that requires clients to
use servers to obtain only metadata, not the data itself. Rather,
Storage Tank clients can access data directly from storage
devices using the high-bandwidth provided by a Fibre Channel or
other high-speed network. Direct data access eliminates server
bottlenecks and provides the performance necessary for
data-intensive applications.
The Storage Tank architecture also makes it possible to bring
the benefits of system-managed storage (SMS) to distributed
environments. Features such as policy-based allocation, volume
management and file management have long been available on
expensive mainframe systems. However, the infrastructure for
such centralized, automated management has been lacking in the
open-systems world. Storage Tank enforces policies and performs
volume and file management without intervention from humans,
thus making it an important step in the direction of autonomic
computing.
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